XHTML — myths and reality

Tina Holmboe is a member of the XHTML Working Group and has an interesting write-up XHTML — myths and reality that discusses the current state of XHTML and dismisses some popular inaccuracies.

Having hyped up the post, it is rather old news - although it is discussed in simple (simplistic?) terms which I find is better than overloading with jargon.

Here are some hilights:

Lack of support for XHTML is a fact of life on the web in 2008. Prior to the 3.0 series of Firefox the XHTML processor in Gecko was so poor that Mozilla's own engineers recommended against it;

No version of Internet Explorer up to, and including, IE 8 support XHTML at all, and a number of other browsers such as Lynx were never written to handle XML in the first place.

I wrote a post for another blog a while back that looked into how you can identify the appropriate doctype for your web page - and stumbled across this "lack of support" for XHTML in modern browsers. You can read the original post How to choose a doctype if you are interested.

Whilst XHTML remains a much more structured (and cleaner) choice to deliver content to the browser, I have yet to work on a single project where it is actually required.

XHTML is the default for use within the Grails framework - even though the worlds most prolific browser doesn't support it. Hmmm.